John is the author of The Zombie Ritual: A Second Coming (A Narrative Intro to Plato's Forms)

When a zombie outbreak puts a teenage dance party to a violent end, lovestruck metalhead Chuck Zelmer finds himself in a bloody, graphic and academically philosophic chase through the halls of the Bed and Breakfast where the party took place.

In 380 BC, the ancient Greek
philosopher Plato (no, not the children’s plaything (in a manner of speaking)) wrote
his classic Republic.

You’d have to have been living under
a rock in the western world to at least not have heard of Plato, and, likely,
his ‘masterwork’, Republic (rock? Or
a shadow of one?...). In it, Plato
lays out the foundations for much of what has become ‘Western Civilization’ in
the centuries since it was written; the ideas of democracy, oligarchy, and
tyranny were all laid out in writing for the first time in Republic, and its idea of ‘the philosopher ruler’ (or: ‘king’,
depending on your translation) is likely the cornerstone from which much
political thought has grown into action (the idea of ‘the philosopher ruler’:
that progressing mankind is not rested on ‘philosopher rulers’ or ‘kings’ ruling
over the rest of mankind as some sort of birth-righted divine being sent only
from God, but that ‘philosophers’ are the ones who should be ‘ruling’, if
ruling is necessary, because being a ‘philosopher’ is knowing that ‘being a philosopher’
is not exactly all pats on the back and yacht parties).

Among many achievements, many credit
Plato with creating what is now the modern novel, and it is not ironic that the
claim comes as an ode to a ‘philosopher’ such as that guy (Plato). Plato wrote
primarily in dialogues, with settings and characters, albeit not developed in
any narrative way (nor too often applicable to the ideas discussed in the
dialogues), talking about the meaning of life, death, and why so many people
seem to love hurting so much. What is a novel if not a discussion of those
things, or a representation of them? And what does ‘the meaning of life, death,
and why so many people seem to love hurting so much’ have to do with seeing the
world objectively? How does one do that?

Being a writer in any time of
political intrigue is to play quite a role, and consciously. No writer goes
about writing thinking: ‘this has nothing to do with the world around me.’ It’s
a given. You are a product of your environment, just as your decisions, as
everyone else’s, affect what that environment is. Writing anything, but
especially novels given their ability to cross over emotional and political
lines if written well enough, is particularly guilty of this, as, further,
recording anything puts a bit more of a lasting immediacy to it. Being a writer
in times such as these (‘times such as these’? 2017: the age of confusion, fake
news #AllHandsMatter , immaturity, HATE) also brings with it something else of quite
the dissociational article: writers are affected by these things, by current
events, facts and other people. You wanna call it emotionally, intellectually,
scientifically, I-don’t-care, if you’re a halfway decent writer, part of your
job is to see and understand the world in a deeper and more relatable way,
through one aspect to most effectively convey both emotions and understandings
to other people, and through another because you, yourself, simply can’t stop
doing it (seeing and understanding the world in a deeper and more relatable
way), for whatever (natural?) reason (no, no; ‘egotistical’ is way more likely).

I don’t mean to say that writers are
any more prone to emotion than anyone else, or that they have any more of a
‘right’ to be, or a ‘job’ to be, but that they are likely expected to attempt
to understand them little better, at least subjectively, and, more so, that we all have the capacity to be ‘writers’,
in that we all are trying to make sense of the world around us and do so
through the veil of facts, knowledge and emotion. At a time when political
upheaval, and public interest in it, is more abundant than bad pop music, this
ability is more important, and observable, than ever (this, of course, assuming
that most people do want to grow as humans, and not just indulge in one of
those three ‘veils’ just mentioned (facts, knowledge, and emotion)).

For one trying to make sense of all
this, it can be a little disheartening. I mean, damn, dude, have you looked
around lately? Canada now has laws enabling the government to forcibly take
your child away if they deem your parenting skills not ‘progressive’ enough, The
U.S. is almost literally tearing itself apart (again), Bangledesh is
practically under water, and, meanwhile, nobody is really talking about these
things–they’re screaming about them. ‘My experience doesn’t care about your
facts!’, ‘facts don’t care about your feelings!’, ‘your feelings, facts, or
knowledge is WRONG and, therefore, you are not a human being!’ Maybe there
is something the anti Bill C-16 people (a controversial Canadian bill that
‘adds gender identify or expression to the list of prohibited grounds of
discrimination in the Canadian human rights act’) are missing? Maybe the
situation in North Korea is as complicated as it seems? Maybe ‘people’ never
change? Maybe democracy is fundamentally flawed? These are questions that need
to be debated dialectically and that simply does not happen by yelling and
screaming and ignoring the existence of other people, no matter how ‘evil’.

Grappling with these questions in any
sort of personally constructive manner (‘writing’ (see: psychologist Carl
Jung’s ‘experiments’ regarding patients and art)) can of course become
difficult when the world seems to beat you mercilessly
at your own game at every turn, which I, personally, like to think that I
can attest to rather well: Pussygate?! Colin Kaepernick? Trudaeu’s abs?!
PIZZAGATE?!?!?! How could anybody ever come up with this stuff, fiction writer,
journalist, plumber or whoever?! It’s like ‘Survivor’ got stacked with the characters
from ‘Jersey Shore’ who then all got thrown into a Dostoevsky novel whose main
theme was: ‘what do you think of InfoWars’ Alex Jones’! The word count alone
would be insane!!! You add in the character that is Vladimir Putin, the
ridiculousness of the situation in Asia, and the potency of the one in the Middle
East, and you got a novel more gripping, emotionally vast, and as
psychologically on-point than any Plato, Stephen King, Jung, or Dostoevsky
could ever even dream of!

Not in a million years would anyone
believe that the things happening in the political spectrum right now actually
happened if it weren’t for the fact that it is all actively being recorded in
real time, as it happens. Perhaps this renders the writer’s ability to merely
represent it obsolete #PostmodernismIsARealTHing,ButItIsNotAnAbsolute ?
Representations are always needed, so long as they are bringing into focus
something that is not obvious in the original thing which it is representing.
May there be ways to ‘represent’ something that are not found in traditional
textbooks or even the all-wise passed-down spoken word?

…

If politics has any relation to the
idea of ‘power’, or, more importantly for my point here, Nietzsche’s ‘will to
power’, it is that politics is essentially a focus of power, or are Nietzsche’s
will to power in-action. If any ‘political power’ wanted to expand itself, as
any primitive entity does (remember: in relation to how long homo-sapiens have
been a species (roughly 200,000 years), the time between Plato (380 BC (ish))
and now is but a blip on the map; and the concepts of economics and
psychology, both so important, complicated, and implicative of ‘the meaning of
life’, and how a species may go about that question, were both just created
within the past 250 years), all it would have to do is blur the ability of ‘the
writer’ to make sense of the world around her. If a political power, or: a
group of Individuals, wanted absolute power, all they would have to do is
hinder the capabilities of its potential subordinates to ‘think’ or ‘will’
‘sense’.

The ‘writer’/‘philosopher’ conveys
personal emotions (and ‘thought’) through the cover of a quasi-reality, or at
least a reality meant to represent itself as such, in the mind, in that bridge where
the conscious meets the unconscious (Jung). This ability can be psychologically
taken away by any number of factors–through stopping the writer from making
sense of her feelings, or from feeling anything in the first place (L), or
through hindering her ability to create realistic worlds, the list could be
quite large–but once it is, people no longer have a guide through which Understanding
is presented as not only possible, but also preferable. ‘Power’ is the antithesis
to ‘Understanding’; one is based in a primal survival instinct, the other in an
intellectual one.

I’ve been working on a satirical
crime noir examining the questions of police brutality, political correctness,
and gang culture through the eyes of a group of college kids too stupid to know
that alcohol consumption impairs judgment. I could get depressed at how
difficult it can be given what’s been going on politically lately (as I
certainly at times have), or I can use that to make it better. Every time I
look at the news, and realize that reality has beaten me to the punch on one of
my points, it forces me to reexamine my stance and, far more importantly, the
way I’m going about showing it through my ‘fictional’ characters, plot turns
and overall story. There’s not much difference between doing that and growing
as a human being, novels just tend to take fewer hours to get through than
lifetimes (hopefully).

The art of the novel, and its
importance, has never been more apparent. The ancient version of ‘why?’ is
today ‘how?’ (terminologically speaking). Let ‘them’ show us what the
difference is; we’ll show ‘them’ that it’s not about ‘the difference’.

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About Me

With a profound interest in religion, liberal politics and humor, Dave began writing in high school and has not given up on it since. His first professional writing jobs came while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh when he was hired to create political cartoons for the Pitt News and to write humor pieces for Smile Magazine. Dave has worked in the newspaper industry as a photographer, in the online publishing industry as a weekly contributor to Streetmail.com, and was a contributing writer to the Buzz On series of informational books, and his story, The Bet in Red Dust, appeared in the Western online anthology, Elbow Creek. Dave’s science fiction novel, Synthetic Blood and Mixed Emotions, is available from its publisher, writewordsinc.com.
Dave currently resides in his childhood home in Toronto, OH with his beautiful girlfriend and his teenage daughter. He enjoys participating in local community events and visiting with his two adult children and his grandkids. Join the Facebook fan-page at https://www.facebook.com/Lupaschwartzmysteries.